Borders, Nation, Memory, and Home: A Study of a ‘Third Space’ in Amitav Ghosh’s the Shadow Lines

Abstract

The novel The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh revolves around the horrors of Partition, trauma of refugees, heartbreak of dislocation and absence of one in own ‘desh’ and a sense of nostalgia and longing to go back to its home land. Ghosh intensively questions the concept of borders through the character of Thamma. Torn between her new found national identity and not being able to distance herself of her origin, Thamma is not sure whether she should go home to Dhaka or come home to Dhaka. Her inquiry on the way up the border between the two countries can be realized as actually absent or present, as she asks, raises the question of how the geopolitical boundaries are actually understood as meaning, legitimate, and arbitrary.

Ghosh, also, builds up an image of free or fluid space that will not have fixed binaries, through the novel. It can be interpreted as transcultural space, a place of cultural and ethnic interaction where characters dream to break artificial boundaries. It is a geographic place that is created through cross-cultural remembering and imagining, and through shared histories and spaces. The intertwined strings of space, memory, history and nation are created throughout the novel in a complex and harmonious pattern. This paper attempts to discuss the concept of the ‘Third Space’, which is at the heart of the concept of transcultural space by Ghosh, as a way of retrieving past and memory and of linking people across cultures and communities across the borders of the shadow lines of territorial and national differences.